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OVERVIEW

The number of magazines with an online counterpart increases every year. This lesson prompts students to act as critical readers as they consider how and why their approach and experiences differ when reading an online version versus a print version of a magazine. Teachers can use this activity as part of a larger unit on media literacy.

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Among having other characteristics, media literacy aims to make students critical and selective viewers and consumers of popular culture and able to reflect critically on their reading process for various media messages.

The study of TV and other mass media, new interactive media, and popular culture is important not only because of their profound influence and pervasiveness, but because of the ways that media easily become "naturalized," part of our daily lives and routines.

Critical media literacy ought to be a fundamental part of education for responsible citizenship in an age where not only entertainment and leisure but work, education, and social relations are increasingly experienced electronically and mediated by dense and overlapping visual, symbolic-iconic, and polycultural meaning systems.